February 3- 9, 2005

city beat

Block Therapy

criminal intent: Among Robert Civera's crime scenes was Suburban Station, where he assaulted a woman (not pictured) in 1999. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Budget woes mean jailed sex offenders don't get adequate counseling.

by Mike Newall

Robert Civera has a terrible habit of exposing his penis to unsuspecting women. He was 7 years old, he says, doodling in a coloring book with an older female playmate the first time he bared himself without invitation. By high school, he was sneaking out at night to peep into the windows of his Drexel Hill neighbors' homes. As an adult, he wantonly displayed himself to scores of women on street corners, in bus stations, on trains or just about anywhere else the mood struck him.

"It's a sexual high. A rush. Euphoria," explained Civera, 37, the other afternoon in the visitor's room of the Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center, where he is serving a 23-month stretch for indecent exposure and simple assault. "I call it the "vapors.' I get lost in the vapors and I can't stop myself."

Civera, aka Robert Depeitro or Robert Casini, is a stout man with wide, darting blue eyes and short brown hair. Other than his propensity for exhibitionism and frotteurism (the act of rubbing against a person in a crowd to attain sexual pleasure), he claims to be a well-mannered individual.

"I'm not a monster," he said over a Plexiglas divider. "Just a person with an illness."

Until recently, Civera had help battling his illness from the Philadelphia Prison System's Sex Offenders Service/Behavior Modification Program. But to the dismay of Civera and other inmates, Philadelphia Prisons Commissioner Leon King terminated the program in December citing financial constraints.

Like all city departments, the prisons system has been forced to tighten its belt in light of budget cuts. (Prison officials are asking inmates with ample money in their commissary accounts to pay for their own toilet paper and soap.) But many in the correctional community are questioning the wisdom of ending specialized treatment to sexual offenders who will soon be circulated back into society. Moreover, the program's termination comes at a time when the system has come under fire for being woefully underfunded and understaffed. Critics claim an alarming number of inmates are being denied adequate rehabilitation and treatment services.

"In all the time I have been involved with the system, we have been shorthanded on staff but this is the absolute worst I've ever seen it," says Harry Moore, who retired as a Philadelphia prison warden in 2002 and now is a consultant for District Council 33, the labor union representing correctional officers. "The public should be concerned. The inmates aren't getting a chance to rehabilitate themselves. The prisoners being discharged now will come out with worse attitudes than ever before."

It is no secret that city prisons have been stretched thin on staff for some time. Due to a rising prison population and a shortage of corrections officers, prisons have been forced since last summer to rely on "restricted movement" tactics, which keep prisoners locked down in cells for longer stretches of time. In some jails, the program centers where prisoners meet for counseling, classes and religious activities have had their operating hours severely slashed.

King downplays the labor shortage as a temporary problem caused mainly by the opening of a women's facility last summer and points to 199 new correctional officers who will begin work throughout the next year. For the time being, he says, regrettably, programs like the sexual offenders treatment are unaffordable luxuries.

"We have to be realistic about budgetary challenges," King said during a recent phone interview. "We have to adapt and restructure our resources."

The two social workers that previously counseled the 25 inmates enrolled in the sex offenders treatment program for three hours a day, five days a week, have been reassigned. Sometime in the future — King cannot say when — a staff psychologist responsible for nearly 1,200 prisoners will hold group therapy sessions with the sex offenders twice a week.

"We are still providing proper treatment to our inmates," King stresses. "We have to save money, but we will do so without compromising security or treatment services."

Prison employees speaking under the condition of anonymity tell a different story. "This place is a complete mess right now," claims one who provides social services to prisoners. "We don't have nearly enough space or manpower to provide adequate treatment."

A 1972 court decision ruled the conditions of confinement within the Philadelphia County prison system were unconstitutional and in violation of state laws; it required that there should be one social worker for every 100 inmates. But Cathy Scott, president of AFSCME Local 2187, which represents prison social workers, estimates that the average social worker has a caseload of 150, with some stretching closer to 200.

"Inmates rarely see their social workers as frequently as they should," Scott says. "Most people are in county prisons for relatively short periods of time. The reality is that the're coming back into our neighborhoods with little treatment."

Robert Civera will be released sometime in the next year. He has served the minimum sentence for the November 2003 incident in which he drove his green Mercury Sable to 18th and Walnut streets, waved a female passerby to his window and exposed himself. Police were alerted and Civera was arrested after a lengthy, high-speed, televised car chase. Police initially considered him a suspect in the Fairmount Park rapist case but DNA cleared him. They did, however, find two outstanding warrants for previous incidents.

In May 1997 Civera was arrested for cornering a 22-year-old woman on a Broad Street subway car and masturbating in front of her. Then, in 1999 he was taken into custody for bumping into a 23-year-old woman during the evening rush hour at Suburban Station and firmly squeezing her left breast. His offending behavior continued on his first day back in prison in November — he had twice before been jailed for indecent exposure — when he displayed himself to a female corrections officer during intake. The officer slugged him in the face.

Civera claims he requested to be placed in sexual-offender treatment upon arrival but was informed that there was a waiting list. He says he was told someone would be by to interview him but, he says, "no one ever came." A few months into his sentence, Civera exposed himself to a secretary in the prison dentist office. He was thrown in the hole for 15 days.

In March, Civera was transferred into the sex-offenders program, which he says included inmates with minor offenses like himself as well as pedophiles and rapists. The program offered individual counseling, relapse prevention classes and a Sexaholics Anonymous 12-step meeting. Inmates were encouraged to explore their "offending cycles" and examine the pain their actions caused their victims. Civera took the program seriously. He wrote up lists of his "triggers" — pornography (especially hardcore), strip clubs, strippers, prostitutes, sexually revealing clothing, vulgarity, open flirtation, drugs and alcohol, coed bathrooms, bookstores, massage parlors, massage parlor ads, personal ads, walking or driving aimlessly around, television, newspapers, videos, magazines, crowds — and determined to alter his destructive behavioral patterns.

Dr. Barry Zakireh of the Joseph J. Peters Institute, a local nonprofit mental health agency that provides outpatient treatment to sexual offenders, says Civera's condition is one of the most difficult sexual offensive behaviors to treat because of the ease it can be accomplished and the perverse pleasure it arouses in offenders. According to Zakireh, there is still debate as to whether exhibitionism and frotteurism are progressive illnesses that eventually lead to more violent crimes. Doctors have told Civera that his actions indicate that he is more prone to rape than pedophilia.

"I don't think I'd ever rape anyone, though," he says. "I've never been a violent person. I wouldn't get off on that."

Civera was crushed when it was announced that the sexual-offenders treatment program would be terminated. He signed his name to a letter of protest penned by inmates and addressed to the mayor.

"It seems quite foolish to attempt to save money by cutting funding for this type of program knowing the increased likelihood of recidivism without it," it read. "How can you put a price on preventing victims of a person who has learned how to control his behavior? You can't."

The mayor has not replied.

"These programs help people put their lives back together and keep women and children from getting hurt," says Civera, who is working with a prison social worker to set up outpatient treatment upon his release. "I'm confident the worst is behind me, and I have very high hopes that I won't offend again, but I could get out of jail and have girls running all around me. I can't say it'll never happen again."